


my lungs are fresh and yours to keep

by scarecrowes



Category: Hannibal Lecter Series - All Media Types
Genre: F/M, Implied Cannibalism, M/M, OT3
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-09
Updated: 2013-04-09
Packaged: 2017-12-08 00:48:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 690
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/755037
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scarecrowes/pseuds/scarecrowes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A series of vignettes, presumably post-series, where Will and Clarice share similar fates.</p>
            </blockquote>





	my lungs are fresh and yours to keep

**Author's Note:**

> My recollection of book canon is rusty if nothing else, so this is something of a mashup of several canons driven largely by the Hannibal premiere.

 

 

In Hannibal's absence, they shake.

Will tosses and turns over the waves of Starling's loneliness that bleed between their bedrooms. He can block her out with less difficulty than Hannibal, but she still cuts him to his bones. Eventually he stumbles to the edge of her bed, aching with early morning and the rings under his eyes. She doesn't welcome him with anything but her toothy smile, but it's still there that Lecter finds them in the early afternoon - half clothed, with Clarice's angry, lacquered nails imprinted in Will's back.

He makes certain to wake them gently, with the press of his lips.

 

* * *

 

There are nights that Hannibal turns to some silent, broken thing that Will can't find his place in. The doctor never crumbles, but his sharp eyes turn cloudy and don't seem to see - he'll hold a book for minutes without turning the page, the brittle edges of his mouth only turning up sparely as Will touches his shoulder, squeezes his wrist. All his hurt spins off his skin and into Will's mouth until he chokes on it, not knowing the words for this, in between the blood and elegance, the nameless dinner plates, the classical music. 

Clarice doesn't touch either of them, not where she is across the room, and Lecter's eyes don't clear - but he stares up at her, up and up through the threads of her rough hands and her gunpowder scar and whispers what Will has been hunting for. It fits like a knife, like a fist full of arrows in his gut.

_Mischa._

* * *

Will wants to hate her, dreams of standing over her bed with one of their keenest kitchen knives, glasses turning his eyes empty in the dark.

But she runs with him on mornings, sweat in her brown hair like it must have been back at the Academy when Lecter was a closed case and Will just a name she knew. She curls her hand around his wrist and squeezes, finding him rocking back and forth to the beat of hooves in the hallway.

And Hannibal pulls them apart when he needs to, when Will asks after the lambs and Clarice's face turns to stone. He drags one and never both of them to bed those days, to hold them in place, hold apart their fists and bones.

Lecter tells him quietly in their aftermath, sharp teeth against the back of his neck, about the brave little girl whose bony hands clutched a lamb, bony knees shaking under its weight, so much bigger than her. 

_The long, long road, her uncle's car coming from behind - so much crueler than she'd dreamed, dear Will._

He dreams of her bedside again, but this time it's no knife in his hand. A fist full of wool and blood, and Clarice's fingers steady while his shake.

 

* * *

 

Hannibal keeps them because they are  _his._

They've each earned this place of theirs, by his side - William with his broken face and old linoleum scar, Clarice and her refusal, her stout and wordless pride. He loves them, in his way. Crawford, long-suffering, guilty Crawford, thinks one of them missing, one dead. 

Hannibal loves them, shapes them in sighs and the curve of his mouth, teaches them language and how best to peel back skin from bone.

Will stops having nightmares, at least the ones that matter. And Clarice only shakes her head when he slips his sister's name between her teeth, laughing and teasing he's lost again, in that palace of his.

He serves them well, of course. He serves them fresh from the woman who thought it wise to stare at his precious boy's twisting scars for too long; from the youth who passed some crude remark to his brave, brave girl, seeing too late she still carries her gun.

Hannibal draws for them, charcoals of the Winter Palace, pen etchings of the view from their hotel in Japan. He allows them their wardrobes on the condition they remain presentable, cheap perfume and ship-bottle-cologne replaced with something faint and floral, sweet and  _his._

He muses sometimes, should they leave him - he'll take her tongue, and his heart.


End file.
